Buying a Fishing Rod for my Grandfather

From China 's first-ever winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature comes an exquisite new book of fictions, none of which has ever been published before in English. A young couple on honeymoon visit a beautiful temple up in the mountains, and spend the day intoxicated by the tranquillity of the setting; a swimmer is paralysed by a sudden cramp and finds himself stranded far out to sea on a cold autumn day; a man reminisces about his beloved grandfather, who used to make his own fishing rods from lengths of crooked bamboo straightened over a fire! Blending the crisp immediacy of the present moment with the soft afterglow of memory and nostalgia, these stories hum with simplicity and wisdom – and will delight anyone who loved Gao's bestselling novels, Soul Mountain and One Man's Bible.
***
These six stories by Nobel Prize winner Gao Xingjian transport the reader to moments where the fragility of love and life, and the haunting power of memory, are beautifully unveiled. In "The Temple," the narrator's acute and mysterious anxiety overshadows the delirious happiness of an outing with his new wife on their honeymoon. In "The Cramp," a man narrowly escapes drowning in the sea, only to find that no one even noticed his absence. In the title story, the narrator attempts to relieve his homesickness only to find that he is lost in a labyrinth of childhood memories.
Everywhere in this collection are powerful psychological portraits of characters whose unarticulated hopes and fears betray the never-ending presence of the past in their present lives.
***
"Beautiful… Suffused with the melancholy of nostalgia." – Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
"[Gao's] narrators walk as if in a dream through a private landscape of memory and sensation." – Boston Globe
"Precisely detailed and delicately suggestive: the best work of Gao's yet to appear in English translation." – Kirkus Reviews
"Beautiful." – Village Voice
"These spare, evocative pieces… offer a sample of Nobel-winner Gao's sharp, poetic early work." – Publishers Weekly
"Observant… For variety of content, stylistic experimentation, graceful language, and poignant insight, Xingjian is a writer who does it all beautifully." – Booklist

One Man

One Man's Bible is the second novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Gao Xingjian to appear in English. Following on the heels of his highly praised Soul Mountain , this later work is as candid as the first, and written with the same grace and beauty.
In a Hong Kong hotel room in 1996, Gao Xingjian's lover, Marguerite, stirs up his memories of childhood and early adult life under the shadow of Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution. Gao has been living in self-imposed exile in France and has traveled to this Western-influenced Chinese city-state, so close to his homeland, for the staging of one of his plays.
What follows is a fictionalized account of Gao Xingjian's life under the Communist regime. Whether in "beehive" offices in Beijing or in isolated rural towns, daily life is riddled with paranoia and fear, as revolutionaries, counterrevolutionaries, reactionaries, counterreactionaries, and government propaganda turn citizens against one another. It is a place where a single sentence spoken ten years earlier can make one an enemy of the state. Gao evokes the spiritual torture of political and intellectual repression in graphic detail, including the heartbreaking betrayals he suffers in his relationships with women and men alike.
One Man's Bible is a profound meditation on the essence of writing, on exile, on the effects of political oppression on the human spirit, and on how the human spirit can triumph.
***
One Man's Bible belongs to that sad class of books sold on the strength of their authors having won a prize. But a prize is rather a thin argument for reading it, especially in a wooden English translation. Does one want to know more about Gao Xingjian than his first novel translated into English, Soul Mountain, told? That book had just enough exotic colour to survive its translation; from its portentous title onwards, One Man's Bible has much less going for it. It needs more story, structure, people, situations, atmosphere, ideas – anything strong enough to come through the obscuring veil of alien words.
When, in 2001, Gao became the first Chinese writer to win a Nobel prize for literature, it came as a surprise. The Chinese literary bureaucrats – today's counterparts of the strange Soviet creatures in Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita – had long been pushing for one of their trusties to win. Gao was certainly not one of those, but neither was he prominent in any of the exiled literary cliques. Since being driven to leave China in the 1980s he had been living in France, writing supposedly experimental, sub-Beckettian plays with Chinese characteristics that some critics in the Chinese-speaking world thought worth discussing. These plays also suited small, subsidised European theatre companies in search of uncommercial exotica full of the timeless wisdom of the east. While still in China, Gao was best known for Bus Stop, a one-acter about people waiting for a bus that never came. What delighted audiences and infuriated the authorities when the play appeared some 20 years ago was its apparent implied message: the never-arriving bus was the wonderful future that the regime promised but could not deliver.
Soul Mountain was fiction in the form of an autobiography (or vice versa) that told a fragmented tale of a writer on the run in the wilder reaches of the Yangtze valley. The background chimed with Gao's own flight from the thought police, as well as being a celebration of "authentic" China surviving 40 years of the party state in remote and picturesque areas. There was quite a lot of sex, too.
One Man's Bible also invites us to read its central character, again an author, as an alter ego of Gao's. As he looks back from cosmopolitan exile in the present – the book was written in the late 1990s – on his life in China, this author makes much of feeling uncomfortable, and wallows in sententiousness. The book starts with a bourgeois childhood before the Communists seized power in 1949 (when the real Gao was eight or nine), moving on to his family's and his own troubles in the unending series of political campaigns that ran through the Mao era and its aftermath. Much of it deals with the cultural revolution, with our hero as participant as well as victim in a hellish process, and with how all this made him what he is now. Between the earlier life and the recent past there is a gap where Soul Mountain might fit.
Like Gao, the central figure in One Man's Bible is an exile based in France who writes fiction and drama in his own language. He enjoys the freedom not to be caught up in politics, and wonders how he came to be what he is. Invitations to events on the international cultural circuit give us scenes in Hong Kong, Sydney, New York, Perpignan and elsewhere, all of which are much the same. None of it seems to matter very much in comparison with the seriously deranged political movements of his youth which, though hindsight tells him they were wrong, he savours the discomfort of remembering.
If Soul Mountain explored China and Chineseness, One Man's Bible is all about enjoying feeling guilty, but not too guilty. It is about not being at home anywhere, not even in your own skin, and making the best of it; about the middle-aged worry over what you were when you were younger. As the central figure looks back over his life, he tries to accept the great realisation that it hasn't meant anything. Yet for all his attempts to be sophisticated, he can't help but feel disappointed at the pointlessness of life. He has not got over the Maoist urge to preach, though it is now a different sermon.
In the past 20 years, having a hard time under the Communist party dictatorship has been the stuff of a commercially flourishing genre of autobiographical writing in English by people, especially women, who have got out. Gao is not into that sort of soppy stuff. His fiction has rather more in common with a newer popular sub-genre of Chinese fiction for foreign readers: unillusioned fucklit, by younger women writers. The China his central character has left was an awful place, but one that gave him access to plenty of women's bodies. The west has given him freedom and more women for his bed, but not happiness or meaning. It has allowed him to hold forth on life and art, even if what he has to say is banal.
As a self-conscious follower of European modernism, Gao does not give us this fictional life in a chronological sequence. He assumes that readers can find their way through the cut-up narrative of the cultural revolution, picking up references as Chinese people of his generation will be able to. Yet most foreigners will simply be confused. They are more likely to follow the novel through the unending couplings with which its subject tries to fill the voids in his past and present lives. We start with a German-Jewish woman in Hong Kong, where one of his plays is being staged. There is another in France, and others collected elsewhere on his travels, as well as the various sexual partners in his earlier life in China. But on the whole, the bodies do not seem to have brains.
The ideas in One Man's Bible are commonplace, its characters are ciphers, and it is not redeemed by wit, grace or self-mockery. Its solipsism is banal. I hope we will not have to endure a third novel in this series on the splendours and miseries of being a Nobel prize-winner.
WJF Jenner is a translator and expert on Chinese writing.

One Man's Bible (chinese)

One Man's Bible is the second novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Gao Xingjian to appear in English. Following on the heels of his highly praised Soul Mountain , this later work is as candid as the first, and written with the same grace and beauty.
In a Hong Kong hotel room in 1996, Gao Xingjian's lover, Marguerite, stirs up his memories of childhood and early adult life under the shadow of Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution. Gao has been living in self-imposed exile in France and has traveled to this Western-influenced Chinese city-state, so close to his homeland, for the staging of one of his plays.
What follows is a fictionalized account of Gao Xingjian's life under the Communist regime. Whether in "beehive" offices in Beijing or in isolated rural towns, daily life is riddled with paranoia and fear, as revolutionaries, counterrevolutionaries, reactionaries, counterreactionaries, and government propaganda turn citizens against one another. It is a place where a single sentence spoken ten years earlier can make one an enemy of the state. Gao evokes the spiritual torture of political and intellectual repression in graphic detail, including the heartbreaking betrayals he suffers in his relationships with women and men alike.
One Man's Bible is a profound meditation on the essence of writing, on exile, on the effects of political oppression on the human spirit, and on how the human spirit can triumph.
***
"Admirable dramatic intensity… valuable for its vivid piecemeal picture of 20th-century China 's culture of revisionist egoism, paranoia and repression."
– Kirkus Reviews
"Unforgettable… One Man's Bible burns with a powerfully individualistic fire of intelligence and depth of feeling."
– New York Times
"A remarkable achievement."
– Christian Science Monitor
"One Man's Bible… has come to claim its place as a powerful narrative… of the Cultural Revolution's insidious, corrosive terror."
– New York Times Book Review
"Captivating… a beautifully stirring account of life in an era of political oppression…[One Man's Bible] is an important book,"
– Fort Worth Star-Telegram
"[Gao] paints a stark, unforgiving picture of the results of Mao's regime and of the Cultural Revolution."
– Denver Post
"If the hallmark of a good novel is its ability to transport the reader, willing or not, into unfamiliar or uncomfortable territory, then this novel is a success."
– Denver Post

Soul Mountain (chinese)

"Soul Mountain is one of those singular literary creations that seem impossible to compare with anything but themselves… In the writing of Gao Xingjian literature is born anew from the struggle of the individual to survive the history of the masses."
– from the citation of the Nobel Prize committee of the Swedish Academy
When this year's Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Chinese expatriate novelist and playwright Gao Xingjian, few in the English-speaking West were familiar with his work. Gao's masterpiece, SOUL MOUNTAIN (PerfectBound, an e-book from HarperCollins; February 20, 2001; $19.95), is a dazzling kaleidoscope of fiction, philosophy, history and fable. Elegantly translated by Australian sinologist Mabel Lee, this richly textured autobiographical novel recounts a dual journey-a literal journey into the heart of China and a spiritual journey of the self.
When Gao was 43, he was incorrectly diagnosed with lung cancer. Resigned to death by the same means that had claimed his father just a few years before, Gao spent six weeks indulging his appetites and reading philosophy. The spot on Gao's lung mysteriously disappeared, but a new threat arose when rumors began to circulate that he was to be sent to a prison farm because of his controversial writings. No longer facing imminent death, the writer quickly left Beijing and disappeared into the remote forest regions of Sichuan, then spent five months wandering along the Yangtze River from its source down to the coast. Gao's 15,000 kilometer sojourn forms the geographic parameters of the fictional journey in SOUL MOUNTAIN.
While on a train at the start of his trip, the writer protagonist meets another traveler who says he is going to Lingshan, "soul mountain," which can be found by the remote source of the You River. The writer has never heard of such a place, and he resolves to go there, but his fellow traveler can give him none but the vaguest directions. Thus begins a metaphoric odyssey into the hinterlands of China and the outlying Qiang, Miao and Yi districts that dangle on the fringes of Han Chinese civilization.
The writer is in search of the traditions that are hidden in rural China, and as he travels he encounters a parade of unforgettable characters who embody both vestiges of the past-Daoist masters, Buddhist monks, ancient calligraphers-and the modern culture that has surfaced since the revolution: small town communist cadres, budding entrepreneurs, independent young girls grappling with parochial repression. The two worlds exist uneasily as one, with stories and customs from centuries past colliding with a world of televisions, automobiles, and technology. All is permeated by the dark legacy of the Cultural Revolution, the encroachment of ecological damage, and the harsh monetary realities of everyday life in contemporary China.
SOUL MOUNTAIN is a dazzling work of the imagination, where classic fables merge with tales of modern cruelty and ancient philosophy does battle with existentialism. But Gao goes deeper still as he explores notions of the devastation of the self at the hands of social expectations. He continually shifts his narrative voice as the "I" of the writer becomes the "you" of an imagined companion, then the "she" of a woman companion. Yet all reflects back on the protagonist, who craves these two seemingly contradictory ends-the solitude necessary for nurturing the self and the anxiety-provoking warmth of human society.
Gao began this novel in the mid-eighties, then carried the manuscript with him when he fled China in 1987. Now living in Paris, he completed the book there in 1989. His writings continue to be banned in his native country. As Gao's work at last gains the public's attention here in the West, SOUL MOUNTAIN provides a dazzling introduction to the achievement of one of contemporary literature's acknowledged masters.